Regards

i already made my fork there, and will take a look as soon as my Real Life(tm) life let’s me.

I haven’t tried branching yet, but I watched the Peepcode screencast and they made it look ridiculously easy. I use Perforce most of the time (not my decision) and it makes branching ridiculously hard and tedious. Perforce’s branching is more like Subversion’s in that you essentially make a copy from one path in the repository to another. Except it’s more complicated than that… first you have to create a branch definition to indicate the source/dest paths, then you run an integrate command using that branch spec (which I believe creates a local copy), and then you submit the files in their new location back to the central repository.

http://www.michaelkerley.net/wp/2010/01/09/pipes-j2me-is-now-open-source/
http://github.com/mkerley/PipesJ2ME

You’ll want to look at the DEVELOPMENT.txt file to see what tools I used to compile. If you (or anyone else) want to get things working with different tools (a different IDE, newer J2ME toolkit, etc), please feel free to share.

I’ve actually been thinking about making some of the changes you suggested. I don’t like seeing 1-2 people filling up the whole top 100 list either. I don’t want to lock it to one account per phone, though. Some people like to hand their phone off to a friend or other people, and in that case it’s nice to be able to just type in a different name. If I do a one-entry-per-person limit, I’ll just do it by name. It won’t be 100% perfect, but it’ll keep things nice and simple.

I also thought about adding an option to view the all-time bests, or just the ones from the past week.

Some other ideas I’ve had (and these are just ideas; I’m not committing to them just yet ) were to add a friends list and some sort of challenge system (“I just beat this puzzle in ____, let’s see if you can beat the same one any faster”). I’ve been playing Bejeweled Blitz quite a bit lately, and it’s a lot more fun and competitive when you actually know who you’re competing against. I would use OpenFeint to provide support for those features, and would migrate the existing leaderboards to OpenFeint as well (as long as they provide some method for doing that).

I like the game ‘Pipes’ very much!

But I really would appreciate a different online high score list:
Only one entry for every user/account and mode with his best time and it’s record date.

It’s really boring to see 75 times ‘MagicMvL’, 52 times ‘Hueg’, 45 times ‘Sonya’
and so on.

And faked times of 0:00.736 or even 00:-2:-392 can’t be welcome.

How to handle only one account?

If Pipes is installed/running the first time an internal (persistent) variable (let’s call it user-id)
is set to default (0 or -1 or something like this).
If a high score is submitted the mode (wrap-around, one-color, size), the time, the name
AND the user-id is sent to the server. If user-id is the default the server generates a unique number
and returns this to the app which will persist it as the new user-id.
From this moment on the submitted times (and perhaps changing names) of the one user/iphone
could be related to each other (and only the best will be stored) and so the high score list
could contain only one entry (per mode) and user-id.

I hope you like the idea and I’m looking forward for the next version of the app and the
new online high score list.

Best regards

By the way, I have a separate page for discussing the iPhone version:
Pipes (iPhone)